Here’s a short video (<11 minutes) that explains the benefits of being in the first 2-3 comments on a new blog post. Then it shows you how to use a free tool to make sure you ARE the first person to leave a comment.
Worth a few minutes of your time? Once the video starts you can change the resolution to 720p and make it full screen to pick up the detail.
Blog Commenting and Feed Notifier
Here’s a bulleted summary:-
- Blog commenting is good for getting backlinks – this is not a secret and has been in use for a long time
- Making relevant comments that add to the orginal article will mean your comments get approved
- Being first with a good comment will mean people may well click through to your site to read anything else you have to say
- You can use a free tool called Feed Notifier that sits quietly in your Windows system tray and monitors a blog’s RSS feed
- When a new post is made, then you can be there within a few minutes and leave the first comment
What isn’t discussed in this video is that RSS has been around for a long time but other than with techies, it’s never really captured the imagination of a wider audience. And that could be because it’s not click-click obvious and not really vital to a general internet user.
However after watching this video, then maybe (like I do) you’ll consider using this small and discrete free tool called Feed Notifier. It seems there are lots of tools and services that supply RSS reading capabilities, but Feed Notifier is quite sexy as it’s so small.
I realised the potential of Feed Notifier a while back and I saw that it’s not only useful for being the first to leave blog comments, but for all sorts of other things too.
For example last year I released a plugin called WordPress Updates which creates a private RSS feed on your blogs that you can subscribe to. When a new plugin or theme update is released, then the feed will be updated and you can pick up the notification using Feed Notifier.
So if you have lots of clients using WordPress blogs that you’re responsible for, then you can install the plugin on all their sites and get an immediate warning from each of them when they need you to go do some work. There’s nothing worse than an angry client complaining their site has been hacked or something has stopped working and you later find out it’s because you didn’t apply the latest updates. 🙄
I also have someone working on creating another new plugin called Events Notifier that will be released shortly. This allows you to create private and public RSS feeds and then add events and a date and time to go with them.
Apart from the obvious private reminders of birthdays, anniversaries etc, you can also use it to set up a public feed and broadcast important events to your subscribers, for example a build up to a new product launch. 😉
Or keep your affiliates notified of changes and new products in your affilaites scheme, or keep your customers updated about updates to products they’ve bought.
More on that little beauty soon.
So I hope you can see that RSS feeds aren’t just for the techies and with a little thought we can all start to benefit from them in all sorts of ways they probably were never intended for. 🙂
Here are some links to tools mentioned in the video, one for Portable Apps and Feed Notifier Portable, and also to the Feed Notifier site itself.
My own personal preference is to go with Portable Apps as it’s just so damn useful, and I’ll do a post about Portable Apps another time explaining how useful it can be even if you don’t use it portably.
-Frank Haywood